


I Made This For You & Stay Over

by Blue_Robin



Series: One Hundred Ways To Say 'I Love You' [3]
Category: Cormoran Strike Series - Robert Galbraith
Genre: F/M, Fluff, Pining, Ponytails
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-13
Updated: 2019-02-13
Packaged: 2019-10-27 16:57:18
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,007
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17770670
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Blue_Robin/pseuds/Blue_Robin





	I Made This For You & Stay Over

**Author's Note:**

  * For [hobbeshalftail3469](https://archiveofourown.org/users/hobbeshalftail3469/gifts), [Nessa_Val](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nessa_Val/gifts).



“Where are you?” Robin asked her partner as she twirled a pen through her fingers and stared at the ceiling of their office. “I’m still at the office, I thought we might have a drink after your surveillance is done.”

“I’m just down the street. I’ll be up in a mo’” Cormoran’s shout came down the line, almost lost in the noise of the jackhammers that were still tearing up Denmark Street. It sometimes felt to Robin like the roadworks were never going to end.

Three years she’d been working with Cormoran, first as his assistant, newly engaged and high on love and anticipation of a beautiful wedding and a happy future. Then she’d fallen in love with the job and become his partner while hiding from the realization that the man she was planning to marry was jealous and petty. Then she’d married that jealous and petty man, only to realize, walking the beach on her honeymoon that she was likely not only just in love with the job…but also with her partner. It had taken another year, feeling guilty for all of the money spent, and the time wasted on the wedding, before she'd discovered that Matthew had been cheating on her, allowing her to find the courage to initiate the divorce she'd just celebrated the finalization of. 

Cormoran was as different from Matthew as night was from day. Matthew had been thin and lanky, trim and golden. Cormoran was huge. Enormous hands, big chest, massive shoulder span, and, most wonderfully to Robin, large of heart.

Matthew had been smaller than Cormoran in so many ways.

Her only regret was that she’d ignored that smallness for so long.

She heard the downstairs door bang as Cormoran entered the building, followed by his heavy tread on the stairs and reached over to drop the pen in the pen holder her dear friend Ilsa Herbert had made her at her first ever pottery class.

It was wonky and misshapen, but it was one of Robin’s most prized possessions. Robin would never forget the shocked and joyful look on Ilsa’s face as she’d noticed it on Robin’s desk three days after she’d given it to Robin, with a slightly embarrassed “I made this for you”, at the Christmas party she and her husband Nick had thrown.

Robin had been a long time without friends of her own, since most of their friends had been Matthew’s mates. She wasn’t sad that she’d “lost” them in the divorce. They’d never been hers to begin with.

But when Cormoran had introduced Robin to his oldest mate Ilsa, shortly after Robin had discovered that Matthew had cheated on her back in uni, she’d felt an instant bond snap into place. It had taken some time and a little awkwardness, but now, after having lived in their spare room for the last few months while she’d saved everything she could to be able to afford a new flat of her own, Robin was an almost permanent fixture at the Herbert household.

A fact that only put her and Cormoran in even more constant contact with each other.

Cormoran swung the office door open with a loudly heaved sigh of relief. “I’m so glad this case is finished,” he exclaimed. “I don’t think I could have taken much more sitting in the park watching that woman massacre art.”

“You got something then?” For the last two weeks they’d been tailing a woman they’d nicknamed Nonet, whose husband suspected her of cheating. So far, they’d not turned up anything other than that she liked to paint really terrible watercolors in Regents Park in the midafternoon. Sometimes she was joined by another young woman who also set up to paint, and seemingly chat, but they’d seen no evidence of Nonet cheating.

“C'mere and have a look,” Cormoran held out his phone to Robin gesturing for her to come to him. She slid around the edge of her desk and moved close to his side. He shifted his weight slightly to the foot closest to her and handed her the phone. This close to him she could smell the lingering tobacco smoke wafting around him, as well as the faint bay rum scent of his aftershave or cologne. It had become an increasingly tantalizing mix of smells over the last three years.

She started flipping through pictures of Nonet chatting to the other woman who was ginger haired and very thin. Cormoran’s arm brushed against the side of her breast as he mumbled, "Here," and reached out to flick to the next set of pictures, impatient for her to see what he’d seen. She knew he didn’t realize he’d brushed against her, but it still sent a frisson of heat through her.

Sometimes she wished he did realize.

“Oh my God!” Robin suddenly exclaimed, her hand grasping the arm he still had extended toward the phone in shock, as the next picture showed the two women leaning into each other, tongues fully engaged in the other’s mouth. “What the…?” she trailed off, completely astounded.

Cormoran’s dark eyes were amused at the shock on her face as she glanced up at him. “I know.” He nodded as he took the phone from her and started the process of emailing the pictures to their Dropbox so that they could be printed and filed in the file to be given to Nonet’s husband tomorrow. “I almost dropped my phone,” he chuckled. He shifted his weight again, and asked “You ready to head to the pub?” with his eyes still on his phone. “I’m dying for a pint.”

“Yep," she nodded as she turned away from him, smiling at the eagerness in his voice. Very little could stand between Cormoran and a pint of Doom Bar. "Let me grab my bag and shut down.” 

He hummed low in his throat, a sound she knew to be one of assent, and walked to the door, still fiddling with his phone. She watched him out of the corner of her eye as he opened the door, then propped himself against the door jamb, to wait patiently for her to go through her routine of shutting the computer down and cleaning up her desk for the day.

His head was lowered toward his phone, allowing the curls on his head to flop forward slightly. His big hands worked on his phone as he turned, absentmindedly to scratch his back against the edge of the door jamb. He was wearing a light blue button down with the sleeves rolled to just below his elbows, a pair of black slacks and the boots he usually wore when he was going to be on surveillance. He shouldn’t have been as attractive to her as he was.

But he was. And lately there had been something slightly different about him. She just hadn't been able to put her finger on what it was. He dressed the same. His hair was just as unruly as ever. He'd lost well over a stone over the last few months. But none of that was the reason for this nagging feeling of something being different about him. 

Brushing the thought away with a small shake of her head she picked up her bag and slung it across her chest as she walked to the door, keys in hand. “Let’s go.”

He glanced up at her, and she noticed a flash of surprise in his eyes as he realized how close she was to him. But he quickly grinned his crinkly eyed grin at her, her favorite one, and swept his arm forward in a mock courtly gesture for her to proceed him out the door. “After you ma’am.”

She snickered as she passed him and stopped, waiting for him to follow her out and shut the door so she could lock it.

As she was doing so, she felt a slight tug on the hair she’d swept up into a ponytail to combat the heat in the office this afternoon. She glanced around with eyebrows raised in surprise, to find him laughing. “I’m sorry. It was too tempting,” he laughed. “You don’t often wear it like this.” He reached up to tug it again. "I kind of like it." His grin was getting crinklier by the moment. 

“It was warm today. And I got tired of it being in my face.” She swatted at him, surprised that he’d been so forward. Though they’d only gotten closer over the last year, hugging more often and kissing the other’s cheek in social settings, their physicality with each other hadn’t progressed much further than that. They were comfortable, but not touchy-feely. Not that Robin would have minded that changing.

There had been many times during the course of her relationship with Cormoran that she’d yearned to rub his back consolingly or grasp his hand in support, especially when he was in pain. Occasionally she’d allowed herself to do that. But she’d not made a habit of it, mostly because he tended to stiffen up when she touched him unexpectedly, for some reason.

“You’re like a boy in Primary school. Tugging on the ponytail of the girl he likes,” she smirked as she turned away from him to head toward the stairs with a shake of her head.

Her foot had just lowered to the first step when she realized what she’d said and she whipped back around, words spilling from her mouth, “That is…,” only to see his dark eyes on her and lit with something that made her feel slightly breathless. “I only meant…,” she tried again.

He stepped closer and she stepped back up onto the landing, turning to face him as he neared her.

But he only continued to watch her face as his hand reached out again, grasping her ponytail and giving it a gentle tug, before allowing his hand to slide down the tail of hair to the back of her neck. His head lowered, and her chin lifted as her eyes closed instinctively. She felt his breath against her ear in a rasped whisper, “Are we going to the pub, Robin?”

He stayed there. His hand on the back of her neck. His lips against her ear. Waiting.

And suddenly she realized, maybe he _was_ aware that he’d brushed against her a few minutes ago.

Maybe the something that had changed about him was the way he looked at her. The way he stood closer to her. The way he shifted slightly closer to her when she was near.

Robin had no idea where she found the courage, but standing on the landing, next to the door of the office they shared every day, enveloped in his unique scent of smoke and bay rum, surrounded by his massive body, she turned her head, allowing her lips to graze his ear, eliciting a sharply indrawn breath from him, and whispered back, “Yes."

She felt his shoulders deflate slightly against her, then continued, "Unless you want to ask me to stay over.”

He drew back and once again, this time his eyes were blazing with unbanked lust. He slid his hand down her ponytail again, allowing his hand to cradle the back of her head in his huge palm, then bringing his right hand up to cup the side of her face, brushing his thumb just under her bottom lip, before lowering his lips to hers in the sweetest and most erotically tender kiss she’d ever received.

He kissed her tentatively but became bolder as she responded in kind. Her hands gripped his shirt as his hands cradled her head before sliding lower to wrap around her waist and lift her slightly off the floor, and into his body.

He broke the kiss after a few moments and grinned that crinkly grin she loved so much, his eyes warm and tender on her face. “Robin?”

“Hmmm?” 

“Stay over?”

She brushed her hand across his forehead, brushing his curls back into place and kissed him again, murmuring against his lips, “Sure.”


End file.
